Is Apify worth the price?
Apify Free tier gives you $5/month in platform credits — enough to run small scraping jobs and test Actors.
Starter at $49/month includes $49 in platform credits plus proxy access, making it effectively the real entry point for production use. Scale at $499/month targets teams running large crawls with $499 in credits, priority support, and team collaboration.
The credit-based model means you pay for what you use (compute, storage, proxy bandwidth), but costs can be unpredictable — a single misconfigured Actor can burn through credits in hours. Compared to building your own scraping infrastructure (Puppeteer + proxy rotation + queue management + storage), Apify saves weeks of engineering time at the cost of per-job pricing.
Pricing Plans
Free
Free
- $5 platform credits/month
- Access to Actor store
- Basic scraping
- Community support
Starter
$39/monthly
- More compute credits
- Scheduled runs
- Email support
- API access
Team
$199/monthly
- Team collaboration
- Higher limits
- Priority support
- Actor development
Business
$999/monthly
- Enterprise-scale scraping
- Custom Actors
- Dedicated support
- SLA
Hidden Costs & Gotchas
Platform credits are consumed by compute (Actor runs), storage (datasets, key-value stores), and proxy bandwidth — all three meters run simultaneously
Residential proxy traffic costs significantly more credits per GB than datacenter proxies — scraping sites with aggressive bot detection drains credits fast
Actor compute is billed per compute unit (1 CU = 1 GB RAM x 1 hour). Browser-based scrapers (Puppeteer/Playwright) use 4-10x more CUs than HTTP-based ones
Storage costs accumulate if you do not clean up datasets — old crawl results are retained and billed until deleted
Pre-built Actors from the marketplace may have per-result pricing set by their authors on top of your platform credit consumption
Monthly credit allocation does not roll over — unused credits from your plan expire at the end of the billing cycle
Enterprise pricing is fully custom and typically starts at $2,000+/month for high-volume scraping operations
Which Plan Do You Need?
Teams that need production-grade web scraping without managing proxy infrastructure, browser farms, or anti-bot bypasses
Developers who want pre-built scrapers (Actors) for common sites — Amazon, Google, Instagram, LinkedIn — without writing code
Organizations requiring scheduled scraping jobs with automatic retries, storage, and webhook integrations
AI/ML teams collecting training data at scale that need rotating proxies and CAPTCHA solving built in
Our Recommendation
solo
Free tier ($5 credits/month) is enough for testing and small personal projects. Starter ($49/month) when you need reliable scheduled scraping. Monitor credit usage closely in the first month to understand your burn rate.
startup
Starter or Scale depending on volume. For under 10,000 pages/day, Starter ($49/month) is usually sufficient. For larger crawls, evaluate Crawlee (free, self-hosted) before committing to Scale ($499/month) — you may save 80% by running your own infrastructure.
enterprise
Scale or Enterprise for high-volume operations. Negotiate custom pricing for predictable monthly spend. Consider a hybrid approach: Apify for complex sites with bot protection, Scrapy/Crawlee self-hosted for simpler sites to reduce credit consumption.
How Apify Compares to Competitors
Scrapy is free and battle-tested for HTTP scraping but lacks built-in browser support and proxy management.
Crawlee (by Apify) is the open-source alternative with Playwright built in — same quality, no platform cost. Bright Data has superior proxy infrastructure but is primarily a proxy provider, not a scraping platform. Apify best value when you need the full managed platform: pre-built Actors, scheduling, storage, and proxy in one place.
